Tag Archives: hype

This blog isn’t even supposed to be back on until next week but you know what they say: strike while the iron’s hot. For some of you at least the first two parts of this title have been flitting back and forth across the internet. “Terry Crews!” whispers one corner excitedly, “wants to play Doomfist!” murmurs another. Because of my search history and their All Seeing Eye Facebook even brought to my attention that thousands of their users were discussing that very subject.

So here I am on a Saturday morning, sitting in front of my laptop determined to bring you literally every piece of information I can find about Terry Crews, Overwatch, and the yet-to-be-released hero Doomfist. Oh, and I’m also going to discussing fan culture so if you want to stick around for that as well that’d be cool.

If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, which is ridiculous because it’s only six minutes long and painfully good, the trailer revolves around two kids witnessing a villainous duo [Reaper and Widowmaker] try to steal an artifact only to be thwarted by ex-Overwatch agents [Tracer and Winston]. The item in question is, like the younger one says, “Doomfist’s gauntlet”. Apparently by wearing it the user “could level a skyscraper.” Continue reading →

As I plainly state in the alternate title to this post, everyone and their [tenuously and amusingly connected other person] has been raving about the trailer that dropped about a week ago for the latest upcoming film in the Star Wars franchise. If, for some reason, you haven’t seen it, here it is:

Since April 16th we have had eight days for the internet to collectively lose their minds over it. Generally in the positive way one does such a thing. I don’t typically like to follow up one YouTube video with another, but this very clever mashup that went viral soon afterwards sums it up a little too well:

Long story short, people are excited. Not even just excited, but actually and honestly emotional about this upcoming film. My Facebook feed was awash with friends raising the hype to what looked like unsustainable levels, yet I can see it only building in fervour the closer we get to December 18th of this year. Don’t get me wrong, I am also looking forward to it, but I’m tempering my enthusiasm for a number of reasons. Continue reading →

But as the storm moved north and decreased in intensity, eventually being downgraded to a tropical storm, grumbling started among people who had spent two hours looking for bread, and New Yorkers especially began saying that the hurricane was gratuitously over-hyped. A New York Times article noted that, unlike the forewarnings, “Windows in skyscrapers did not shatter. Subway tunnels did not flood. Power was not shut off pre-emptively. The water grid did not burst. There were no reported fatalities in the five boroughs. And the rivers flanking Manhattan did not overrun their banks.”

And there was quite a bit of hype about Irene, mostly in the northern states, where hurricanes are less common and therefore more exciting for meteorologists, like this poor weatherguy who pretends to be buffeted around as people hang out on the boardwalk:

(The worse part is when the anchor says “There are, like, people sightseeing behind you. We can see them.” and he says “That’s because they are hardcore weather-watchers!“)

New Yorker Editorialist Adam Gopnik called ‘startling’ “the relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios—the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about.”

Many commentators, like editorialist Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast called out news stations for rabidly covering anything to do with the hurricane while failing to adequately cover the political events in Libya.

And of course, there have been deaths and significant losses in states all along the coast. Just because New York City didn’t collapse doesn’t mean that Irene wasn’t a significant disaster, and every time a columnist starts to talk about “sensationalism”, they are quickly reminded of this fact. But this just adds to the media’s kind of embarrassingly transparent public introspection that seems to be common now after significant unplanned events.

And just for fun, here’s that video of that reporter reporting while getting covered in sea gunk: